Values the first casualty as we go on the warpath

January 25, 2003 — 11.00am

It is a distressing thing to have to say on the very eve of Australia Day, but this is a dangerous time for Australians. That is not to make the obvious point that we may yet be the target of a terrorist attack, nor that the breathtaking belligerence of our chief ally, the US, may oblige us to send our young men and women into to a war we would rather not fight.

Those are real enough dangers, but I believe an even greater, more insidious danger looms: the danger of a cultural degeneration that will see some of our most cherished values challenged and possibly even eroded. Australia Day might therefore be a good time to stare some unpalatable truths in the face and decide whether we really want to go on as we are.

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We are in danger of swapping our long-held faith in egalitarianism for a tediously conventional three-class structure of social stratification based on nothing but money. While those at the top of the heap bray about economic growth and prosperity for all, the yawning gap between top and bottom continues to widen. Indeed, the growing disparity between our high- and low-income earners puts us among the least equitable countries in the OECD.

We are also in danger of losing our hard-won reputation for fairness, decency and tolerance. While most of us love the richness and diversity of our culture, the harshness of the Government's response to asylum seekers has given us permission to unleash some old prejudices.

Vilification is back in vogue, under the guise of "being free to say what we really think"; racial stereotyping is rampant; levels of tolerance are slipping as our insecurities multiply. The Government, for its own political purposes, promotes fear and anxiety via a media campaign calculated to keep us nervous ("keep an eye out for anything suspicious"). This is as cynical as anything we've seen in contemporary politics, and it is bad for us.

Darren Lehmann's infamous racial slur is but a symptom of a society in which intolerance and discourtesy are given increasingly free rein, even while we pretend otherwise. (Our all-conquering cricket team has done nothing to dispel the impression of Australians as ill-mannered, arrogant and possibly even racist in our predispositions.)

When we can treat the children of refugees like criminals, holding them behind razor wire for years, we have lost something that was precious in our national character. When we can take money that might otherwise be devoted to the care of our sick and elderly, or to the revival of our ailing universities, and apply it to an increased defence budget that will facilitate our gung-ho support for the US military machine, our priorities are surely in need of urgent investigation.

As things stand, we are in danger of sounding pathetically eager to be sworn in as one of President Bush's deputies, committed to imposing a US-style morality on the world. We have gone along with the Bush-inspired concept of the "war on terror", and that has become the rubric under which any act of aggression - against Afghanistan, against Iraq, against anyone - can apparently be justified.

We should be debating our role in this grand American plan for global domination, in which regimes judged to be immoral or repressive - or perhaps merely inimical to the political aims and economic interests of the US - will be picked off, one by one, and replaced with leaders more to the US's liking ... at least for the time being.

If Iraq is such a hot target for our national wrath that we are prepared to commit troops to its invasion, what should we be saying about regimes in Zimbabwe (grizzling about cricket matches is a very different thing from sending in troops), or North Korea or China?

Are we to be such an uncritical ally of the US that we will simply go along with notions such as "pre-emptive self-defence" or "regime change" as if they are as much a part of our moral framework as of America's? That would be very dangerous for us: the belief that "might is right", like the belief in the justifiability of revenge, is ultimately self-destructive, but it is especially bizarre when it is based on the borrowed might of another country.

No one but a fool would wish to turn back the clock, but those of us who believe in a fair, decent and egalitarian Australia - those who take pride in our harmonious multiculturalism - may need to speak up more urgently in defence of values we once thought were immutable. Many of those who mouth nationalistic platitudes have become careless, to say the least, about preserving the good work of generations of Australians who made us what we are, and that's dangerous.